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Roadster Official Range

Since this was announced while our forum was MIA, a recap may be in order.

The official numbers. . .

city driving: 252 miles

highway driving: 236 miles

combined cycle: 245 miles

At first glance this looks like fantastic, amazing news. Tesla shot way over their goal of 200 miles and came within a piddling 5 miles of their original 250-mile promise. At a second glance, it's still excellent but not quite so amazing.

The original estimate from when the Roadster was unveiled called for 250 highway miles, and "slightly more" in city driving. So, by that measure we went from 250 to 236 -- a decrease of 14 miles, or 5.6%. Note also that this is measuring from a nearly-new ESS, with only 1,000 miles of breaking-in. The ESS capacity will still degrade with age and use, as we've long been told.

Even though dozens of media outlets reported when the Roadster's range estimate was reduced to only 200 miles, that was never exactly true. Tesla actually said they weren't going to achieve 250 miles, and so decided to call it "over 200 miles" until they had more accurate data. The press cynically assumed that was code-speak for "we may squeeze 200 miles out of it if we're lucky". But of course, it wasn't code-speak for anything. Tesla were telling it exactly the way it was, and the press was simply painting the worst possible spin on that, as they always tend to do.

But you know, it worked out well. Now it looks like Tesla pulled a "Scotty" -- by under-promising and over-delivering.

To put all this into a larger perspective: The previous champion in this category was the 2nd generation GM EV1 with NiMH batteries, which achieved 140 miles per charge. The Tesla Roadster exceeds that by a whopping 75%!

I'd say with the range numbers they give if the realworld worstcase scenario you can get is 165 miles that should be more than enough. Especially now that they are getting high speed chargers at Marriots. Marriot need to do a eat dinner at our restaurant and get free charging offer That way you do a nice and slow dinner and then get an hour or two of charging on the car and are ready to continue driving. Sounds like a good deal...

The range numbers are still fantastic even though they had to retreat a bit from the original suggestions. Drooling over prototype specs is often frustrating because cars always lose something on the way to production.

The Toyota MR-S -> MR-Spyder was the best job I can recall of the production car retaining most of the magic of the prototype.

The Porsche Boxster is a fantastic car, but the original prototype had much more interesting styling.